My web site on Free-Online was recently removed without informing me, by the Support Team, or their automaton.  The reason was excessive data traffic, it transpired eventually.  When I finally stumbled across the relevent statistics, it seems that after nearly a year of low usage, in May there was a sudden leap, and in June it went through the roof, the level being about 15 times what it had been.
My sitemeter statistics show nothing out of the ordinary for these last two months, and I am not aware of having done anything special.
It has been suggested that my web site is the victim of so-called 'hotlinking', which I'd not heard of before.  My site contains a lot of quite attractive nature photographs, and possibly these are what is attracting predators. 
Does anyone have experience of this sort of thing, and explain in smple words what it happening, please?  Can anyone suggest how I can prevent this happening once my site has been restored, please?
Cheers...

Hi there.

This unfortunately is not an uncommon occurrence.

The UserGroup have a Tutorial here http://usertools.plus.net/tutorials/id/5 which should shed some light on preventative action.

Browse down to the Preventing hot linking of images section and you'll see some handy code which you can deploy.

Hope that helps.